From May 8–10, 2024, the Smithsonian American Art Museum will present a series of lectures by the museum’s 2023–2024 research fellows. This webcast captures the five talks presented in Sessions V and VI of the series on May 10. For more information on SAAM’s fellowship program, visit https://americanart.si.edu/research/fellowships.



The fifth session brings together discussions of three contemporary artists and their relationships to museums and institutions, featuring new scholarship by predoctoral fellows Sadé Ayorinde and Adela Kim and senior fellow Alex Dika Seggerman. Presentations in this session address the use of invisibility as a strategy in the work of Glenn Ligon; Andrea Fraser’s interventions in curatorial methods of display at the University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley; and the relationship of artists Shirin Neshat, Ghada Amer, and Shahzia Sikander with both American art and the art of Islam.



The sixth session pairs new research by senior fellows Jenni Sorkin and Namita Wiggers on developments in American craft history over the last three decades. These presentations take as their subjects group exhibitions of textile-based sculpture in the 1990s and exhibitions trends in U.S. craft museums between 2000 and 2020.


Session V: Moderated by Saisha Grayson, curator of time-based media, Smithsonian American Art Museum

- Sadé Ayorinde, Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art, Cornell University, "You Might Wanna Get Ghost: Invisibility as Strategy in Glenn Ligon's 'To Disembark'"
- Adela Kim, Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellow, Yale University, “In Appropriate Institutions: Andrea Fraser’s Tearing Critique, 1991–1993”
- Alex Dika Seggerman, Patricia and Phillip Frost Senior Fellow, Rutgers University-Newark, “Untangling Islam in American Art: Shirin Neshat, Ghada Amer, and Shahzia Sikander”


Session VI: Moderated by Mary Savig, Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft, Renwick Gallery

- Jenni Sorkin, SAAM Senior Fellow in American Craft, University of California, Santa Barbara, “The Metaphoric Textile: Regional Group Exhibitions of the 1990s"
- Namita Wiggers, Smithsonian Institution Senior Fellow, Critical Craft Forum, “Making Craft History: Exhibitions in U.S. Craft Museums, 2000–2020”